Midweek Faith Lift
January 23, 2019
Living as the Beloved Community
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On this day that we honor Rev. King, let us focus on him as minister, because that was his first and ultimate call, to minister, to the black community, to the white community and ultimately to the nation. His powerful words of spiritual truth ring out for us as a clarion call just as strong today as when he spoke them during the 1960’s civil rights struggle. The events of the past several years tell us that we need to listen, lean in and this time really hear what is being asked of us. What does Spirit, God, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Allah, Yahweh, the I AM that I AM ask of us to live as the Beloved Community? All spiritual paths ask the same thing in different ways and it is time for the churches to hear. It is time for our consciousness to hear, to lean in and listen with the heart.
That means that we listen to what is not easy to hear, to what is uncomfortable and to what challenges our assumptions about who we are and how we show up. That means that we ask ourselves to tolerate the discomfort necessary for spiritual and emotional growth. These are not an easy ask because the answers are not readily evident or clear. We are for the most part here at Unity of Ames, a congregation of white privilege that is unaware of what that privilege really grants to us. We listen, knowing that the invisible nature of our white privilege is an obstacle to our listening with clarity. As we embark on a path of listening from the heart, may we begin to know the truth of the Zen Koan, “The obstacle is the path.”
King’s message was to embrace nonviolence because it leads to change without leaving a wake of bitterness, divisiveness, brutality and arrogance in the victors and despair, hopelessness and destructiveness in the vanquished. King’s invitation was to a path of reconciliation, reparation, understanding, goodwill, and love that creates and builds up the beloved community. What Rev. King’s journey of nonviolence did was allow the nation to see the obstacle, the white hatred toward blacks. When the majority culture saw fire hoses and billy clubs being turned on innocent people on the evening news, the hatred was made visible. The obstacle of white hatred became the path to change, to civil rights for all. It is not an easy path. As Rev. King said It requires a “qualitative change in our souls and a quantitative change in our lives” if we are going to truly live that path of becoming the Beloved Community.
When I was a young person in the 60’s there was nothing I wanted more than to do that, to create the Beloved Community. His ideals spoke to my heart, to my higher self, to my idealism. I wanted to be there, in that beloved community, and I wanted to do it without having to engage the obstacles within myself. I wanted to believe that I was already there! I volunteered at a day camp at an inner city school in St. Louis as a high school student. All the black girls in that camp loved my hair and wanted to comb and play with it. I didn’t understand that; now I do. I wanted to be that person of goodwill without also seeing that at the end of the day, I was just a visitor in that inner city day camp and I could easily leave with my “good hair” and go home. I was a visitor to that community, much as I wanted to think I was more than that.
When I worked in inner city schools in Des Moines, that quest for beloved community was still alive in my heart but I really needed to listen and learn. The kids referred to me were for the most part African American. I was so blessed with an African American colleague who was willing to educate me. She was so courageously honest that it was painful to have her confront my ignorance. It was interesting that other white colleagues on our team came to my defense, but by the grace of God, I listened rather than defend myself. She prescribed a reading program, which I did over the summer. She introduced me to Maya Angelou and Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison….and Black and White Styles in Conflict, which was a real eye opener. Thank you, Lois Vincent, my eyes began to see as I read.
What I noticed was that as I listened to Lois and other African American teachers without an agenda, we began to work together much better as a team. There was an honesty and openness among us that began to create a sense of caring, safety and truly a beloved community. We were more effective team and we could design tough love interventions for kids that made a difference. It was one of the most challenging and meaningful passages of my education as a psychologist in the Des Moines Schools. And it became a kind of ministry. The greatest honor for me was to be invited to the home of my principal, Alex Hanna, an African American man who had completed his Ed.S. degree in Administration. I noted that I was the only white person there and, an African American teacher said to me, “Yeah, and we’re a whole lot nicer to you than if it were the other way around.” Ouch! I smiled at her and said, “You are so right! And I deeply appreciate that!”
Now, as a minister, my education continues, and I have Rev. Kim Turner Baker, the new Rector at St. John’s Episcopal Church to thank for that. An an AARLA meeting last fall, she asked the group if we had read, Dear White Christians by Jennifer Harvey, a Drake University professor of religion. Well, I have read it now, and wow, what an education! And I am only half way through. And she gave me additional reading materials, which I continue to read and digest, including a poem, which I will share with you today. It is clear that we, in this country, have a “white problem” that we cannot clearly see. One indicator is that as Americans, we, as white folk, don’t have to hyphenate our identity, we are just Americans. That is privilege.
I have been confronted by a Unity minister of color for interrupting her to speak to the CEO of Unity, assuming that with white privilege, I could do that without any obvious consequence. And then I did it again! Ooops, not a quick learner! But I made amends and acknowledged my blunder when she pointed it out. And I felt the sting of exercising the obstacle to living as the Beloved Community that white privilege is. I have a lot to learn; we have a lot to learn. As we heard last week, “let him who has ears to hear, listen to what Spirit is saying to the churches.”
As I walk this path that invites the obstacle of white privilege to be the path, I contemplated what Jesus, as our Way Shower might have to say about it. A particular scripture popped into my mind and it is from the Gospel of John and it is about the Man Born Blind.
John 9:1-7
A Man Born Blind Receives Sight
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. (NRSV)
This tells us several really significant things and that is that while we may be blind, it is not a sin to not see. What our parents did is not given to us as a punishment. Rather, the blindness that we have is an opportunity for God’s works to be revealed in us, for love to be revealed in us. Jesus, or the Christ within us is the light of the world, and as long as that Christ light is in the world, we can do the work of love. It requires something of us, just as the story says of the man born blind. We have to cleanse our consciousness to clearly see the obstacles to loving, to living as the Beloved Community, then we will see.
How do we do that? We listen to what Spirit is saying to the Churches. We listen to our brothers and sisters of color to learn what the journey is for them and how it is to navigate a world of privilege that they do not enjoy. We listen, even when it is painful. Earlier this fall, I shared a story told by the Rabbi at Tifferith Israel Synagogue about two neighbors. One asked the other, “Dear neighbor, as I have been taught to do, I love you.” The neighbor asked, “Do you know what causes me pain?” And the first one said, “No I really don’t.” to which the second one replied, “then you don’t really love me.”
Here is what causes pain to our brothers and sisters of color. It is a poem for my white friends by Norma Johnson of Boulder, Colorado titled “I Didn’t Tell You.”
May we listen and love and lean it.
Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb